Stress and Intonation
These are the videos I posted on the Moodle site for students, for self-study in intonation. All are by the same online teacher, who does a really fabulous job, taking learners into the world of stress patterns with practice sentences like this: Clients get haircuts. Clients will get haircuts. His clients will get haircuts. His […]
Teaching pronunciation using jazz chants
Carol Graham trains teachers how to use jazz chants to teach pronunciation. They’re great energizers and get learners speaking faster than they can think – one of the elements of fluency. I’ll be doing some jazz chants in the telephoning part of a compact course next week, first giving them some jazz chant minis (see […]
Midnight in Paris: Discourse markers
Today my main task was to find examples of discourse markers in context in a movie trailer, explaining their functions in a given utterance. I chose Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen and, because it caught my imagination, transcribed and thought through more than necessary. It’s fun to examine a dialogue and make what is […]
Sound wave: Owa Tana Siam
This brilliant sketch by the late Ronnie Barker is an eye-opener – or an ear-opener! – to how we preempt meaning when we listen. I found it on Abiloon’s lovely blog – full transcript there. I would use this video to raise student awareness for the way we anticipate what the speaker will say next. […]
Practice academic writing skills 2: Ambiguity
One of the most important elements of good writing is clarity. Unfortunately, English has a lot of potential for ambiguity, which makes it easy to write ambiguous sentences. Great for humor, of course, but not a lot of help when it comes to writing works of science! One example is the use of prepositions. Compare: […]
Practice academic writing skills 1: Parallelism
Parallelism adds elegance to your writing: Clumsy: They work with great care and effectively. Elegant: They work carefully and effectively. Clumsy: Making contacts is as important as to give a good presentation. Elegant: Making contacts is as important as giving a good presentation. Clumsy: We analyzed the extensive data, which was highly complex. Elegant: We […]
Phonology 101
On our course Patricia introduced us to two great sites to help with phonology. First, there’s the excellent online typewriter, the Phonemic Character Keyboard, which is based on the comprehensive IPA character picker, two tools which, taken together, are just what you need to be able to write a post like this! Then, there’s the […]
